The Bouchout Declaration is an outcome of Pro-iBiosphere, a European Union-funded coordination project to develop a blueprint for the next cyber-research infrastructure for open biodiversity knowledge management. Biodiversity-related institutions and individuals who share the vision expressed in the Bouchout Declaration are warmly encouraged to sign the Declaration at http://bouchout-declaration.org/. The Declaration has so far been signed by 84 organizations and 169 individuals from around the world.

The purpose of the Bouchout Declaration is to help make digital data about our biodiversity openly available. It offers members of the biodiversity community a way to demonstrate their commitment to open science.

Furthermore, Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management will improve availability to information, increase the role and relevance of its participants, increase their impact, and reduce costs. As a society, we will understand our natural world better, manage it better, enable new types of discovery, return greater benefits to biomedical and agricultural endeavours, and increase food security.

The signatories encourage an overarching approach to Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management which is based on the following fundamental principles:

• The free and open use of digital resources about biodiversity and associated access services;
• Licenses or waivers that grant or allow all users a free, irrevocable, world-wide, right to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly as well as to build on the work and to make derivative works, subject to proper attribution consistent with community practices, while recognizing that providers may develop commercial products with more restrictive licensing.
• Policy developments that will foster free and open access to biodiversity data;
• Tracking the use of identifiers in links and citations to ensure that sources and suppliers of data are assigned credit for their contributions;
• An agreed infrastructure, standards and protocols to improve access to and use of open data;
• Registers for content and services to allow discovery, access and use of open data;
• Persistent identifiers for data objects and physical objects such as specimens, images and taxonomic treatments with standard mechanisms to take users directly to content and data;
• Linking data using agreed vocabularies, both within and beyond biodiversity, that enable participation in the Linked Open Data Cloud;
• Dialogue to refine the concept, priorities and technical requirements of Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management;
• A sustainable Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management that is attentive to scientific, sociological, legal, and financial aspects.